Monthly Update: November 2025

Hello everyone, welcome to our monthly newsletter, November 2025 edition. Please subscribe to receive monthly updates of all the exciting work happening at BG Lab. Also, don’t forget to follow us on our X channel!

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Please email brian.shkabari@queensu.ca if you need full access to any of our publications.

Peer Reviewed Publications

  1. Our colleague from Nepal Ramila Shilpakar and trainee at our lab, Brian Shkabari led and published a paper in JCO Global Oncology on the availability, affordability, and price variation of GI cancer medicines in Nepal. Our paper highlights that most cancer drugs in Nepal are unavailable, even when available are mostly unaffordable, and there are substantial, up to 10-fold, variations in the price of same medicines based on which brand and hospital you choose. We discuss the need for regulation of cancer drug prices in Nepal, and provide recommendations on specific national, institutional, and physician-level changes that can improve price transparency while reducing patients’ financial burden. Graphical abstract below created by Laure-Anne Teuwen.
  1. BG published a thought-provoking paper in JNCI where he argues a new way to think about de-escalation trials in oncology. He argues that de-escalation trials should be designed using a superiority design rather than the typical non-inferiority design. This paper is currently only in the form of preprint, so we haven’t promoted this on social media yet. But as a reader of our newsletters, you get to know about it first!
  1. BG along with colleagues, published a paper in JNCI about the financial difficulty experienced by patients with cancer participating in clinical trials, and its association with patient survival and quality of life. Notably, it was found that of the 37% of participants who had financial difficulty, 25% experienced worse financial struggles after enrolling in a clinical trial – this was associated with poor quality of life.

Media

  1. BG lab started creating monthly newsletters. Last month was our first! You can read it here.
  1. BG posted a new Medscape blog post highlighting positive changes he has noticed in clinical trials that were reported during ESMO 2025.
  1. BG talked with host Dr. Jasmine Kamboj on OncoDaily’s podcast: Empowering Oncologists? They discussed cancer groundshot, financial toxicity, the mission behind Common Sense Oncology, and making cancer care fairer and more sustainable.

Talks, Presentations, and Meetings

  1. BG spoke at the Advanced Breast Cancer Global Alliance Meeting (ABC8) in Lisbon, discussing issues surrounding various endpoints in breast cancer trials. He has spoken at ABC meetings three previous times, and was delighted to see that the audience is now more receptive to our ideas, proposals, and viewpoints that our lab has been advocating for a long time – this was also reflected on an X post by Dr. Larsson who attended the meeting.
  1. BG also participated in a panel discussion on patient engagement in research at the 11th CEEHRC meeting.
  1. Brian Shkabari gave an oral presentation at Queen’s Oncology Research Day discussing our work on the unavailability, unaffordability, and price variations of GI cancer drugs in Nepal, the results of which are published here.
  1. Nicole Vorko gave an oral presentation at Queen’s Oncology Research Day discussing results from our study investigating the Health Canada cancer drug approval landscape (ongoing work at our lab).

5. Laure-Anne Teuwen presented a poster at the AORTIC 2025 meeting discussing her work from Malawi studying 2-drug versus 3-drug neoadjuvant chemotherapy for locally advanced cervical cancer when radiotherapy is not available.

Upcoming Events

  1. Sign up for our first BG Lab webinar in collaboration with Tata Medical Center Kolkata and BALCO Medical, Raipur, where we will discuss how oncologists integrate approvals, guidelines, endpoints, magnitude of benefit, and drug prices into treatment decisions. Register today to secure your seat!

2. BG received the 2024 William E. Rawls Prize by the Canadian Cancer Society! There is a celebration event happening on December 4th at the SCRI Seminar Room at Queen’s University. BG will give a talk on his research career followed by an award ceremony and refreshments. This is an in-person event, so join us in congratulating BG if you are in Kingston!

  1. BG will be a faculty and a mentor at the ON-COLLAB International Workshop on Oncology Research Methods in Brazil from December 6 to 10. Besides mentoring research projects, he will be lecturing on endpoints in clinical trials, non-inferiority design trials, and biases in the interpretation of clinical trials.

From the Archives

In this section every month, we will highlight a paper from the past that you may have missed.

  • BG published his first ever journal article in 2014. This was a correspondence in The Lancet Oncology about cancer care and research in Nepal in response to the Lancet Oncology commission report on cancer care in India, China, and Russia. Once BG’s eyes were opened to the world of evidence-based medicine and the possibility of biases, even in “gold-standard articles published in gold-standard journals,” he wrote several letters to the editor in his initial days highlighting issues with several trials, including those published in JCO, Annals of Oncology, and Lancet Oncology. This is how BG started his journey into both evidence-based oncology and academic publication.

Do you like what we do? You can support us!

The type of work that we do is often not funded by traditional funding channels. If you like our work and want to support us with a donation to our lab, please reach out directly to BG at gyawali.bishal@queensu.ca.

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Thank you for reading and stay tuned for next month’s update!

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